All my life, I’ve loved the sound a screen door makes — it has a tone all its own, one that cannot be easily duplicated. In our part of the world, we have screen porches, NOT screened-in porches. I believe it is one of life’s true necessities. While keeping blood-thirsty mosquitoes at bay, it also allows us to keep alive some of the romance attached to the Old South, reminding us of a time not so long ago when people were more loving and less harried.

I’m a Southern woman who needs my screen porch more than I need corporation ulcers. I want to drink my morning coffee out on the porch while watching the cardinals eat their breakfast. I want to end the day there with a nice glass of wine and the love of my life sitting beside me.

The Sea Island Company, in a fit of infinite wisdom, has put an end to morning joggers and late afternoon walkers on the golf paths outside of our house. I miss waving to my neighbors, calling out to them to come sit for a spell on my screen porch. Our once friendly neighborhood has become sterile, just a little too perfect, a landscape painting, a still life.

So when has life ever been static? It was less than perfect while I was growing up in the Old South in the fifties. My parents worked hard and took pride in what they could accomplish on Daddy’s meager salary as the town’s police chief. Goals? Their big goals were to provide an education for their children and to do whatever it took to make our lives easier than theirs had been.

Times sure have changed.

In the not too distant past, the Old South woman was too often characterized as barefoot and pregnant, spending her summer days putting up butterbeans in Mason jars. Thank the Lord that’s over.

The New South women of today are more often top executives at Coca-Cola. They do their jobs between having kids, face-lifts and tummy tucks. I dress each morning in Fruit of the Loom sweats; they put on designer suits and proceed to put in a full day putting out FAXES.

Unlike the old order, the New South woman does not cook. I’m not even sure she eats. She makes a phone call so that dinner can be delivered by the time she gets home from the office. She hires a nanny to tend the children; she takes her iphone to their soccer games.

This new breed of Southern woman does not screen in her back porch, she encloses it in tinted, tempered glass surrounding a built-in wet bar. Like her children, her hanging ferns are professionally tended, although her upscale interior gardener may well refuse to “do” common spider plants and philodendrons.

When the holidays roll around, another hired person comes in early one morning, decorates the family Christmas tree and charges big bucks for this service. The nanny picks up the kids from school and brings them back home to the perfect house with the perfect tree. The kids are instructed not to go near it. Little Timmy’s hand-made paper garlands that he gently pasted together with white glue will not find a bare limb from which to hang.

I am not criticizing this new version of the Steel Magnolia, I am making an observation. To me, a well-ordered, well-decorated home requires much planning and often is a work of art. I am appreciative of all things beautiful.

I am reminded, however, of a rich, beautiful woman I once knew. My friends and I were envious of the woman who had everything. But it wasn’t until the year she kept her Christmas wreath hanging on the door until after Valentine’s Day that we began to like her. That’s when she became human enough, imperfect enough, to be one of us.

Even though many things in the Old South were in need of improvement, most of the time the job got done without too many complaints.

The tire swing that hung in back yards in every town and throughout the countryside was replaced by a pricey tire horse, beautifully created out of what once was a plain old tire. Modern ingenuity at its best?

Teflon makes is easier than the heavy iron skillets and grits pots of yesteryear I used to scrub. I love Teflon. Teflon is my friend. Speaking of friends, only a fool would complain about dishwashers.

But some things don’t need improving. Apple bobbing doesn’t. Ferris Wheels don’t. Cane pole fishing on a riverbank with Grandpa, is a rite of passage no costly video game will ever top. Fishing doesn’t need improving.

Holding hands with the love of my life while watching a sunset from my screen porch?

Priceless.